Novant Health creates more time for patient care with ServiceNow

Novant Health’s IT team works hard to deliver exceptional experiences to patients and employees
At 15 hospitals and more than 350 physician practices, Novant Health’s clinicians deliver remarkable experiences for patients. They form personal connections, communicate in easy-to-understand language, and take advantage of world-class technology to partner with patients for every step of the health and wellness journey. But Novant Health’s emphasis on exceptional customer service doesn’t stop with patients.

“Novant Health’s tradition of remarkable customer experience applies to pretty much everybody, including support teams like Digital Products and Services (DPS),” says Franck Nkashama, Process Architect at Novant Health. DPS is the company’s IT team. “We work equally hard to ensure team members who deliver the patient experience also benefit from an extraordinary support experience so they can get their work done better and faster.”

For Novant Health’s IT team, making employees’ lives easier means reducing redundant workloads
Franck says one example of how DPS helps frontline employees is by minimizing the effort required to resolve work issues. Previously, IT support staff had to consult several different applications—such as Microsoft OneNote and SharePoint—to get the information needed to resolve issues that impeded patient services. This drastically slowed time to resolution.

When Novant Health employees submitted tickets through the self-service portal, they would sit in a queue until the issues in front of it got resolved. IT required a full-time service desk technician to read the description and route it to the most appropriate team.

Franck believed if the company implemented a single platform to streamline and automate this process, the manual workload of the IT support staff would be lighter, allowing them to resolve more issues faster. But Novant Health didn’t have that capability—until it deployed the Now Platform to bring unity, transparency, simplicity, and automation to its IT support workflows.

Now Intelligence brings workflow automation, faster response times, and self-service to support clinicians
As the intelligence layer of the Now Platform, Now Intelligence® delivers insight and automation to make workflows smarter and faster by anticipating trends, predicting future outcomes, automatically categorizing and routing work, solving the most prevalent issues, and more.

Novant Health initially deployed ServiceNow to automate the IT ticketing system, then added ServiceNow® Predictive Intelligence to bring a layer of machine learning to automatically categorize and assign tickets, and set priority levels. Predictive Intelligence also helps Novant Health technicians predict new major incidents and recommends the best action to resolve the issue.

Training the machine learning model was a simple and quick process for Novant Health
“My director and I sat down, and within 15 minutes we had our first solution,” says Franck. “Then it took about an hour and a half to run the report and collect all the historical data.”

About 50% of the 25,000 incidents DPS receives each month go through Predictive Intelligence, including all the non-self-service tickets. Novant Health uses ServiceNow® Performance Analytics to track how team members are using Predictive Intelligence and how it’s impacting ticket assignments and resolution times. This allows Franck’s team to continuously tweak Predictive Intelligence to improve response times.

ServiceNow® Knowledge Management is providing standardized templates, formats, and a simple process so team members can easily publish knowledge articles to the self-service portal to promote employee self-help. “The content is presented consistently, so it all looks the same to the employees, our internal customers,” says Franck. “That’s unmatched.”

ServiceNow® Virtual Agent also empowers employees with a self-service chatbot that has significantly decreased previously long on-hold times with DPS. “Once our team members go to the service portal, our virtual agent immediately greets them by name, makes them feel comfortable, and presents their options,” says Franck.

Now, the entire ticketing system—including resources to resolve the issue—are in ServiceNow. “When someone creates a ticket in ServiceNow, they can stay in the platform to get educated on how best to resolve it and notify their teammates and track their progress,” says Franck. “We have a single source of truth, a single repository.”

ServiceNow decreases workloads, increases accuracy
About 40% of self-service tickets go through Predictive Intelligence, which has cut the self-service workload in half. 

In the first five months, Predictive Intelligence made more than 100,000 predictions with 79% accuracy, according to Franck. That accuracy helps reduce human errors in assignments—which also means decreasing resolution times. After the implementation, ticket reassignments dropped by 30%.

ServiceNow gives Novant Health’s DPS team 28 more hours every week
Franck says the automation, Predictive Intelligence, and Virtual Agent capabilities save the DPS service desk about 28 hours a week in redundant work. Then, there’s the as-yet-uncalculated savings that comes from incident deflection delivered by the service portal and Predictive Intelligence.

“The collaboration and interaction between Predictive Intelligence and Knowledge Management allows technicians to resolve cases using the knowledge base,” says Franck. “If we have the knowledge base articles pushed out by Predictive Intelligence to our front-facing customers, and they can resolve the issues themselves, then we’ll start really getting some good savings.”

In the long run, as Now Intelligence helps to resolve more and more incidents, the savings could be tremendous for Novant Health, predicts Franck. “Predictive Intelligence opened our eyes to new possibilities,” says Franck. “With the help of Performance Analytics, we now know we can get back roughly 28 hours in a week. We can continue spending the same amount, but we get better value because our team members’ time is spent better, on more complex and interesting work that could potentially create new opportunities.”

Novant Health is creating its story—and its workflows—in just one powerful platform: ServiceNow
“After we went through digital transformation—and we’re still going through it—we adopted a more agile methodology,” says Franck. “We’re setting up our product teams so we’re able to deliver results faster. Our agile groups and our sprint planning all are done in the Now Platform.”

“We are creating our story, we’re creating our work, and we’re tracking delivery in one platform,” adds Franck. “That’s very powerful for us. It offers a higher level of convenience, but at the same time it’s simple and enjoyable to know that I could just go to one screen for all my dashboards and reports. I can track how I’m delivering value, and I can plan for the next project within one tool.”

“It’s amazing,” says Franck. “It’s allowing team members to focus on value-add tasks. It is the perfect example of minimizing rework.”

Up next is automation of more complex workflows
Although ServiceNow was initially deployed to be the ticketing software, it’s far beyond that now. “When we hear the word ServiceNow, the first thought is not incidents or tickets,” says Franck. “We’re wondering what’s new and what we can do now. The whole mindset, especially around service management, is different. We’re constantly looking at what we can do better, what we can do differently, and how the Now Platform can help us on that journey.”

For Franck, this means more automated workflows. “When you start thinking about automation, doors open up. One of the cool things I’m looking at is, how can I automate more? How can I automate more complex work, things we were always sure required at least two people to execute? How can we simplify that process with a single click of a button? These changes are on the horizon—they’re coming. I’m excited to see how we can partner with ServiceNow on that journey.”

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